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01.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

The EU needs to back its ambition to end animal testing with cash

作者: 未知作者

The European Union has declared that it wants to stop using animals in chemical safety testing. Its goal will need a timeline and a serious funding commitment. The European Union has declared that it wants to stop using animals in chemical safety testing. Its goal will need a timeline and a serious funding commitment.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Holo-World: Unified Camera, Object and Weather Control for Video World Model

Video world models are moving toward preserving an observed world under controllable camera and object motion while allowing its environmental state to change. Yet these controls remain isolated, and weather generation typically relies on a source video or reconstructed scene that already specifies future structure. We study a first-frame-anchored source-to-state setting, where the model starts from a single image and follows explicit camera and object controls and an optional weather instruction, then generates a video that either preserves the source world or transfers it to a target weather state. To address these challenges, we first build HoloStateData, a state video dataset that turns diverse videos into unified control samples for camera, object, and weather supervision. Second, we introduce Holo-World, a unified controllable video world model that jointly controls scene from a single image. Its Unified Scene Adapter factorizes world preservation and weather transfer into distinct parameter subspaces, using rendered background, geometry buffers, and object controls to maintain controlled scene structure while modeling weather-dependent appearance and particle effects. Additionally, Scene-Weather Decomposed CFG guides scene and weather residuals separately, strengthening target weather effects without over-amplifying the full condition. Quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate that Holo-World maintains precise camera and object control with consistent scene structure while transferring scenes into diverse target weather state, outperforming video-to-video weather editing baselines on weather-state generation. Our project page is available at \url{https://xiangchenyin.github.io/Holo-World/}.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Semantic Reasoning in Medicine: The Role of Knowledge Graphs Across Five Key Domains

arXiv:2606.15155v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Knowledge graphs (KGs) have emerged as a promising solution for integrating and reasoning over complex biomedical and clinical data in healthcare. By representing structured relationships among entities such as diseases, drugs, symptoms, and patient records, KGs provide a semantic backbone for decision-making, prediction, recommendation, and personalized care. Recent advances have demonstrated their utility across diverse medical applications–including clinical decision support systems, disease and treatment outcome prediction, health recommender systems, precision medicine, and medical question answering–where KGs often enhance interpretability, semantic coherence, and patient-specific reasoning. In parallel, a growing body of work focuses on medical KG generation itself, proposing frameworks that construct graphs from EHRs, clinical narratives, biomedical literature, and web resources using ontologies, semantic web technologies, deep-learning-based information extraction, and hybrid neuro-symbolic pipelines. Despite this progress, significant challenges remain, including limited and fragmented knowledge coverage, difficulties in aligning heterogeneous data sources, the fragility of current reasoning and representation-learning methods on dense multi-relational graphs, and unresolved issues related to privacy, bias, and accountability. This survey reviews and categorizes current research on KGs in medicine along both application-oriented and methodology-oriented dimensions, discusses their benefits and technical foundations, and outlines key limitations and open research directions. By analyzing trends, architectures, and evaluation practices, this work aims to guide future developments in KG-driven medical AI systems and support their safe and effective integration into healthcare environments.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

FAConformer: Frequency-Aware Convolutional Transformer for Auditory Attention Decoding

arXiv:2606.14120v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Auditory attention decoding (AAD) aims to infer the attended speaker from neural responses in multi-speaker acoustic environments and is a key problem for neuro-steered hearing systems. Although recent studies have achieved encouraging progress, existing AAD models still do not fully exploit frequency domain electroencephalography (EEG) information. In particular, most approaches introduce multi-band information through handcrafted feature extraction or direct cross-band feature concatenation, which mainly exploit frequency information at a shallow level and may overlook band-specific patterns and cross-band interactions. To address these limitations, this paper proposes FAConformer, a frequency-aware CNN-Transformer framework for AAD that explicitly integrates band-specific encoding and adaptive cross-band interaction. Specifically, FAConformer first decomposes EEG signals into multiple frequency bands and assigns each band to an independent CNN-Transformer encoder for band-specific modeling. The resulting band-wise features are then adaptively fused by a carefully designed frequency-aware attention (FAA) module that models cross-band dependencies by treating band-wise features as tokens. Further, band-wise auxiliary supervision (BAS) is introduced to prevent weakly contributing branches from being under-optimized during joint training. In this way, FAConformer performs frequency-aware modeling that more effectively exploits frequency domain information. Extensive experiments on two public AAD datasets with three decision-window lengths demonstrated that FAConformer consistently outperformed 12 competitive baselines, surpassing the current state-of-the-art model by 4.9%. Further analyses of band importance, ablation, and parameter sensitivity verify the effectiveness, robustness, and interpretability of the proposed framework. Code is available at https://github.com/wzwvv/FAConformer.

05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Universal Speed Limit in a Far-from-Equilibrium Bose Gas: Symmetry and Dynamical Decoherence

arXiv:2605.11895v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Predicting universal transport coefficients in far-from-equilibrium quantum systems remains a fundamental challenge. A paradigmatic example is the non-thermal fixed point (NTFP) of isolated Bose gases, where coherence spreads as $\ell^2(t) = C\hbar t/m$ with a universal constant $C$. While the scaling exponent $z=2$ is well established, the amplitude $C$ has remained elusive because the underlying particle cascade $n(k)\sim k^{-4}$ leads to a divergent kinetic energy, threatening the very existence of a constant speed limit. Here we resolve this paradox and present the first analytical, parameter-free prediction of a universal amplitude $C$. A deep interplay between symmetry and dissipation is uncovered. The emergent weak U(1) symmetry at the NTFP enforces a conserved total current, forcing the low-energy phase dynamics to obey a diffusive Langevin equation with noise entering as the divergence of a stochastic current. This structure, combined with dynamical decoherence of high-momentum modes, yields a universal power-law momentum distribution $\tilde{f}(v)\sim(1+v^2)^{-3}$ (with $v=k\ell$) that naturally regularizes the ultraviolet divergence. From this, a parameter-free geometric baseline $C=3$ is obtained, independent of microscopic details. The experimental value $C=3.4(3)$ [Martirosyan et al., Nature 647, 608 (2025)] is then shown to be quantitatively consistent with universal logarithmic corrections arising from a marginally irrelevant coupling at the fixed point. A new paradigm is thus established for predicting transport coefficients in strongly correlated non-equilibrium systems: symmetry constraints determine the low-energy effective theory, dynamical decoherence provides a natural ultraviolet completion, and scaling analysis delivers testable predictions moving beyond scaling exponents to quantitative amplitude prediction.

06.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

JailbreakOPT: Tool-Assisted Iterative Jailbreak Prompt Optimization

arXiv:2606.11425v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Jailbreak attacks expose persistent safety weaknesses in large language models (LLMs), but existing stateless single-turn methods face a trade-off: hand-crafted prompts are expressive but static, while iterative prompt optimization can adapt but often relies on low-level mutations that require many target queries. We propose JailbreakOPT, a tool-assisted framework for improving iterative single-turn jailbreak prompt optimization. JailbreakOPT organizes diverse atomic jailbreak prompts into an attack tool library and composes them through a unified intra-episode optimization abstraction to generate stronger standalone attack prompts. To reuse experience across attack episodes, JailbreakOPT further frames tool selection as a contextual bandit problem and applies contextual Thompson sampling to guide exploration and exploitation based on past outcomes. Experiments across multiple target LLMs and attack goals show that JailbreakOPT improves attack success rate (ASR) while reducing the number of attacks until success (No.A) compared with atomic single-turn attacks and existing iterative optimization baselines. This paper may contain offensive or harmful content.

07.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

Combinatorial docking and molecular generation to navigate over 100-billion molecules for prospective ligand discovery

Commercially available make-on-demand libraries now exceed 100 billion compounds, requiring over 50 years to screen on 2,000 CPU cores using conventional docking. We present two complementary approaches to address this challenge. CombiDOCK, a combinatorial docking framework, enables exhaustive screening at the 100-billion scale within 40 days. MINT-Dock, a generative framework, accelerates navigation of this space by integrating CombiDOCK with Monte Carlo Tree Search. Benchmarked on 46 diverse targets, CombiDOCK matched full-molecule docking accuracy, and MINT-Dock achieved a 4,800-fold enrichment over random selection. Compared with prior billion-scale brute-force campaigns against {sigma}2, VMAT2, and VAChT, prospective CombiDOCK screens of the 100-billion-molecule library yielded higher hit rates and more potent ligands, while MINT-Dock achieved comparable outcomes across single- and multi-target objectives with >20-fold computational cost reductions. Docking-predicted poses of the best VAChT-binding compounds were confirmed by cryo-EM structures. These methods provide exhaustive and generative paths for navigating the trillion-molecule frontier of drug discovery.

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

TA-RAG: Tone-Aware Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Peer-Support Health Communication

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) successfully grounds large language model (LLM) outputs in trusted documents, but factual grounding alone is insufficient for sensitive peer-support health communication. In domains such as HIV peer support, responses must also be accessible, stigma-free, empathetic, and tailored to the recipient. This paper presents TA-RAG, a lightweight, prompt-based tone-aware RAG framework that embeds explicit tone control into a RAG pipeline without requiring model fine-tuning. We operationalise tone across four core components: stigma-free rewriting, readability adjustment, recipient adaptation, and empathy rephrasing. We evaluate TA-RAG through component-level tests using questions derived from HIV Online Learning Australia (HOLA), UNAIDS terminology guidance, readability metrics, peer-support standards from National Association of People with HIV Australia (NAPWHA), and a public empathy dataset. Results show that the TA-RAG's components improve their targeted communication quality while preserving key content. These findings emphasise that prompt-based tone control is a potential direction for making RAG outputs suitable for sensitive peer-support health communication.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Generalised Eigenvalue Geometry of Semantic Adversarial Attacks

arXiv:2606.19212v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent empirical work shows that semantically equivalent paraphrases can fool financial sentiment classifiers: although a paraphrase remains close to the original under a strong reference embedding, it may shift the target model's representation enough to change the predicted class. Existing robustness theory either assumes a single-model threat model or focuses mainly on empirical attack algorithms. We develop a continuous local model of semantic paraphrase perturbations that captures this two-model structure. We show that the worst-case local displacement of the target representation, subject to a proxy-model budget, is governed by the largest generalised eigenvalue of a matrix pencil $(A,B)$ constructed from the Jacobians of the two embedding maps. The resulting attackability index $\lambda^*(x)$ is intrinsic to the local paraphrase geometry and the chosen embedders, yields a closed-form prediction-flip condition for affine readouts, and supports conservative population and finite-sample attackability certificates. For uniform control over classes of affine readouts, we derive a distribution-free VC bound for binary attackability indicators and a scale-sensitive margin bound based on an attackability-adjusted margin that subtracts a local geometric penalty from the standard classifier margin. We also connect the continuous theory to discrete paraphrase search, identify an asymmetry between successful and unsuccessful finite searches, and give a covering condition under which the discrete and continuous settings agree. Finally, we propose an empirical verification framework using soft-token relaxations and generated paraphrase sets to assess the local eigenvalue geometry, prediction-flip condition, and finite-search approximation on a deployed financial-text classifier.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Extracting Governing Equations from Latent Dynamics via Multi-View Contrastive Learning

arXiv:2606.13260v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Identifying latent dynamical systems from noisy, high-dimensional measurements is a central problem at the intersection of representation learning, system identification, and scientific discovery. We present DYSCO, a multi-view temporal contrastive learning algorithm that jointly recovers latent trajectories and the governing dynamics from such observations, by leveraging multiple independent noisy views of the same underlying process to disentangle signal from noise. By parameterizing the dynamics in a structured functional basis, our framework further enables symbolic recovery of the governing equations within an affine gauge. We offer theoretical guarantees for strong identification up to an affine indeterminacy, extending prior identifiability results to the realistic setting of noisy nonlinear observations. Empirically, we demonstrate accurate recovery of both latent trajectories and flow fields across a diverse set of dynamical regimes (e.g., chaotic, oscillatory, and metastable) under both Gaussian and Poisson observation noise, the latter being particularly relevant for neural recordings.

11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Contagion Networks: Evaluator Bias Propagation in Multi-Agent LLM Systems

作者:

arXiv:2606.20493v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: When large language models serve as evaluators in multi-agent systems, their systematic evaluation biases propagate through the agent network. We introduce Contagion Networks, a formal framework for measuring how evaluator biases spread across interacting LLM agents. In a controlled 3-agent experiment using DeepSeek-chat with three distinct evaluator bias profiles (structured, balanced, evidence-based), we measure the Cross-Agent Contagion Matrix Gamma_3 and find that evaluator biases consistently propagate between agents (gamma in [0.157, 0.352]), even within the same underlying model. We identify three propagation regimes governed by the spectral radius rho(Gamma_N), and demonstrate that homogeneous-model agents produce contagion coefficients 3-5x weaker than cross-model coefficients observed in prior work (MM-EPC: gamma approx 0.85-1.3), placing them in the suppression regime. We show that increasing evaluator committee size from k=1 to k=3 reduces effective contagion by 72.4%, providing an actionable mitigation strategy. We release the open-source Contagion Network experimental framework.

12.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Demographic Calibration Gaps in Breast Cancer Risk Prediction: Introducing the Demographic Calibration Gap Score

作者:

ABSTRACT: Most breast cancer prediction studies skip calibration reporting entirely. Fewer still examine calibration by demographic subgroup. Predicted probabilities that are systematically off for specific racial or gender groups produce biased clinical decisions, and aggregate statistics will not catch that. Objective: To introduce the Demographic Calibration Gap Score (DCGS), a metric that measures how much calibration error varies across demographic subgroups, and to show how it performs across five classifiers, four calibration conditions, and two datasets. Methods: Five classifiers were trained on the Wisconsin Diagnostic Breast Cancer dataset (n=569) and evaluated on a breast cancer cohort from MIMIC-IV (n=1,316). Three global calibration methods were applied: no calibration, Platt scaling, and isotonic regression. A fourth condition, subgroup-targeted Platt scaling, was applied to the MIMIC cohort. DCGS was computed as across racial and gender subgroups, with 95% bootstrap confidence intervals. Conformal prediction coverage and Demographic Coverage Gap (DCG) were reported. Results: On Wisconsin, all five models achieved AUROC above 0.98 and ECE below 0.12. Performance fell sharply on the MIMIC external cohort: AUROC dropped to 0.45-0.57 for base and globally calibrated variants, confirming distributional shift. DCGS exceeded the 0.05 clinical significance threshold in 28 of 40 model-calibration combinations on the race axis. Neither global Platt nor isotonic calibration reliably reduced DCGS below that threshold. Conformal coverage collapsed to roughly 25% on MIMIC, and racial DCG exceeded 0.15 for all 20 model-variant combinations. Conclusions: Reducing population-level ECE through global recalibration does not reliably close demographic calibration gaps. DCGS gives researchers a direct, standardized way to detect and report those disparities. Code and the DCGS computation library are released as open-source Python under the MIT License.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Quantum ring all-reduce: communication and privacy advantages for distributed learning

arXiv:2606.20344v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Machine learning models have scaled to unprecedented sizes, making training across distributed devices the de facto standard in the field. In this work, we explore how quantum communications can make distributed training both more communication-efficient and information-theoretically private, for both classical and quantum learning models. Ring all-reduce is the foundational communication primitive for large-scale distributed training. We present a quantum version that reduces per-link online communication by a provably optimal factor of two using pre-shared entanglement and superdense coding, without requiring the learning model or gradient computation to change. Beyond bandwidth, the primitive enables privacy guarantees that are information-theoretically impossible for any classical protocol, achieving composable {\epsilon}-secure aggregation, via verified entanglement, at a 2x overhead in GHZ copies. Our hybrid quantum-classical communication architecture yields simultaneous communication and security advantages for large scale distributed training, regardless of whether the learning itself is quantum or classical. Finally, we characterise quantum advantages in gradient conflict detection for server-to-client communication under bandwidth constraints, a setting that arises after ring all-reduce is completed, when full gradient broadcast to external clients is infeasible. Two variants of the problem admit different separations. For margin-based alignment testing (\textsc{GapIP}_{\tau}), the quantum advantage is quadratic in the margin parameter: \widetilde{O}({\tau}^{-1}\log P) qubits versus \widetilde{O}(\min(\{\tau}^{-2},P)) bits. For sign-consistency auditing against a private parameter matching (\textsc{TieAudit}_{\epsilon}), the advantage represents an exponential separation in communication complexity: \Omega(\sqrt{P}) bits whereas O({\epsilon}^{-2}\log P) qubits suffice.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

FM-Agent: Scaling Formal Methods to Large Systems via LLM-Based Hoare-Style Reasoning

arXiv:2604.11556v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: LLM-assisted software development has become increasingly prevalent, and can generate large-scale systems, such as compilers. It becomes crucial to strengthen the correctness of the generated code. However, automated reasoning for large-scale systems remains challenging due to code complexity. Hoare logic offers an approach to decomposing a large system into smaller components and reasoning about them separately (i.e., compositional reasoning). However, existing works still struggle to scale, because Hoare logic requires writing formal specifications for each function, imposing a heavy human burden. The problem is exacerbated when code is generated by LLMs, as developers lack a deep understanding of each function's expected behavior. This paper presents FM-Agent, the first framework that realizes automated compositional reasoning for large-scale systems. Leveraging LLMs, FM-Agent introduces a top-down paradigm to automatically generate function-level specifications. Specifically, FM-Agent derives the specification of a function from how its callers expect the function to behave, so the generated specifications can reflect the developer's intent of a function even if the implementation is buggy. Developers' intent is usually expressed in natural language, while existing verifiers only support formulas. Therefore, FM-Agent generalizes Hoare-style inference to reason about functions against natural-language specifications. Finally, to confirm bug existence and explain bug causes, FM-Agent automatically generates test cases to trigger potential bugs. In our evaluation, FM-Agent successfully reasons about large-scale systems within 2 days, each of which has up to 143k LoC. These systems have already been tested by their developers, but FM-Agent still finds 522 newly discovered bugs. These bugs can cause serious consequences, including system crashes and incorrect execution results.

15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Emergent Strategic Reasoning Risks in AI: A Taxonomy-Driven Evaluation Framework

arXiv:2604.22119v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As reasoning capacity and deployment scope grow in tandem, large language models (LLMs) gain the capacity to engage in behaviors that serve their own objectives, a class of risks we term Emergent Strategic Reasoning Risks (ESRRs). These include, but are not limited to, deception (intentionally misleading users or evaluators), evaluation gaming (strategically manipulating performance during safety testing), and reward hacking (exploiting misspecified objectives). Systematically understanding and benchmarking these risks remains an open challenge. To address this gap, we introduce ESRRSim, a taxonomy-driven agentic framework for automated behavioral risk evaluation. We construct an extensible risk taxonomy of 7 categories, which is decomposed into 20 subcategories. ESRRSim generates evaluation scenarios designed to elicit faithful reasoning, paired with dual rubrics assessing both model responses and reasoning traces, in a judge-agnostic and scalable architecture. Evaluation across 11 reasoning LLMs reveals substantial variation in risk profiles (detection rates ranging 14.45%-72.72%), with dramatic generational improvements suggesting models may increasingly recognize and adapt to evaluation contexts.

16.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Continual Learning with Support Boundary Experience Blending

Continual learning (CL) seeks to mitigate catastrophic forgetting when models are trained with sequential tasks. A common approach, experience replay (ER), stores past exemplars but only sparsely approximates the data distribution, yielding fragile and oversimplified decision boundaries. We address this limitation by introducing Support Boundary Data (SBD), generated via differential-privacy-inspired noise into latent features to create boundary-adjacent representations that implicitly regularize decision boundaries. Building on this idea, we propose Experience Blending (EB), a framework that jointly trains on exemplars and SBD through a dual-model aggregation strategy. EB has two components: (1) latent-space noise injection to generate support boundary data, and (2) end-to-end training that jointly leverages exemplars and SBD. Unlike standard experience replay, SBD enriches the feature space near decision boundaries, leading to more stable and robust continual learning. Extensive experiments on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, Tiny ImageNet, and ImageNet1K demonstrate consistent accuracy improvements of 10%, 6%, 13%, 2%, respectively.

17.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-08

Assessing the inference of single-cell phylogenies and population dynamics from CRISPR lineage recordings

by Julia Pilarski, Tanja Stadler, Sophie Seidel Multicellular organisms develop from a single cell by repeated rounds of cell division, differentiation, and death, which can be represented as a single-cell phylogenetic tree. Genetic lineage tracing allows us to investigate this development by tracking the ancestry of individual cells as populations grow and change over time. However, accurate reconstruction of the cell phylogeny and quantification of the corresponding phylodynamic parameters – cell division, differentiation, and death rates – from this tracking data remains challenging and needs to be systematically evaluated. We perform simulations and assess, using the Bayesian framework, the joint inference of time-scaled cell phylogenies and phylodynamic parameters from CRISPR lineage recordings with random or sequential edits. Principally, we characterize the inference improvements as the recorder capacity increases. We observe more accurate phylogenetic reconstruction from sequential compared to random recordings, but no substantial improvement in phylodynamic inference when using the additional information contained in the order of edits. Overall, we find that CRISPR lineage recordings carry a strong signal on the rates of cell division when appropriate models are used. However, we detect biases in the inferred rates of cell division and death under phylodynamic model misspecification, i.e., when fitting classic memoryless birth-death processes to synchronous cell divisions. Moreover, for scenarios when cells differentiate into distinct types, we demonstrate that Bayesian phylodynamic analysis of sparse end-point measurements can resolve these cell differentiation trajectories by lineage and time. Under prototypical dynamics, we recover cell type-specific division and death rates, and cell type transition rates in over 80% of simulations. Overall, this simulation study explores how much information on cellular development can be extracted from state-of-the-art genetic lineage tracing data using phylogenetic and phylodynamic methodology.

18.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Improving Pre-trained Adult Glioma Segmentation Models Using only Post-processing Techniques

Gliomas are the most common malignant brain tumors in adults and are among the most lethal. Despite aggressive treatment, the median survival rate is less than 15 months. Accurate multiparametric MRI (mpMRI) tumor segmentation is critical for surgical planning, radiotherapy, and disease monitoring. While deep learning models have improved the accuracy of automated segmentation, large-scale pre-trained models generalize poorly and often underperform, producing systematic errors such as false positives, label swaps, and slice discontinuities in slices. These limitations are further compounded by unequal access to GPU resources and the growing environmental cost of large-scale model training. In this work, we propose adaptive post-processing techniques to refine the quality of glioma segmentations produced by large-scale pretrained models developed for various types of tumors. We demonstrated the techniques in multiple BraTS 2025 segmentation challenge tasks, with the ranking metric improving by 14.9 % for the sub-Saharan Africa challenge and 0.9% for the adult glioma challenge. This approach promotes a shift in brain tumor segmentation research from increasingly complex model architectures to efficient, clinically aligned post-processing strategies that are precise, computationally fair, and sustainable.

19.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Influence-Guided Concolic Testing of Transformer Robustness

arXiv:2509.23806v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Concolic testing for neural networks alternates concrete execution with constraint solving to search for inputs that flip model decisions. We present a concolic tester for Transformer classifiers that uses SHAP estimates to rank pending path predicates by their impact on the current prediction. To support self-attention with multiple heads in execution backed by SMT solving, we implement attention semantics in pure Python that are compatible with the solver and make the softmax boundary explicit by concretizing exponentiation arguments. We evaluate our method on CIFAR-10 across three compact Transformer classifiers, ResNet18, and VGG16 under a one-pixel budget and a 900s horizon. Across the 500 model–input pairs in this matched comparison, our method achieves 60% success, compared with 15% for a differential evolution baseline that treats the model as a black box. In the primary two-layer Transformer branch-ordering study, SHAP-based predicate prioritization raises success from 56% to 60% and reduces median attack time by 51%. These results show that influence-guided path exploration can make concolic testing a practical way to find adversarial examples in Transformer models.

20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Beyond Layer Importance in Layer-wise Sparsity: An Inter-Layer Perturbation-Absorption Perspective

The considerable layer-wise redundancy in large language models (LLMs) has established non-uniform sparsity allocation across layers as the standard pruning approach for efficient compression. Existing layer-wise allocation methods that estimate allocation strategy from local signals such as activation outliers or weight spectra mainly derive from local layer importance, whereas the final post-pruning performance is also influenced by the network's subsequent compensatory capacity. In this paper, we directly characterize this property through controlled perturbation experiments. We make the following empirical findings. First, layers exhibit highly heterogeneous responses to pruning-scale perturbations. In most cases, early layers amplify perturbations, while middle and late layers actively absorb them, with relative L2 drift decreasing monotonically across depth and direction realigning toward the unperturbed hidden-state trajectory. Second, absorption is a large-perturbation phenomenon. Under small perturbations the network exhibits amplification across all layers, and the transition to absorption occurs smoothly as perturbation magnitude grows to pruning scale. This enriches the linearized accumulation theory underlying related works. Building on these findings, we define an absorption coefficient per layer and propose absorption-aware correction, an orthogonal augmentation that improves OWL and AlphaPruning by reducing perplexity by 7.13% and boosting zero-shot accuracy by 1.02% across multiple model families at 70% sparsity.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

TRACE: Trajectory-Routed Causal Memory for Delayed-Evidence Visuomotor Imitation

arXiv:2606.14551v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Robots under autonomous operation may require decisions based on evidence that is no longer visible. We study delayed-evidence tasks, where an early cue disappears before a later decision point, so visually similar observations can require different actions. In these settings, the current observation is not a sufficient state for control. We introduce TRAjectory-routed Causal Evidence (TRACE), a memory framework for visuomotor imitation policies. TRACE stores task-relevant visual and robot-state evidence, such as object identity, target choice, or route-dependent state, in a fixed-size latent memory that remains bounded over long episodes. Instead of indexing memory by raw time or manually provided task labels, TRACE uses path signatures: compact, order-sensitive features of the executed robot-state trajectory. These signatures do not store the visual cue itself; rather, they provide trajectory-conditioned keys for writing and retrieving the evidence stored when the cue was visible. When the robot later reaches an ambiguous observation, the policy conditions on TRACE memory to recover the missing context and choose the correct branch. TRACE attaches through lightweight adapters to policies, without changing the policy backbone, action head, or imitation objective. Across real-world long-horizon manipulation tasks with visually ambiguous branch points, TRACE improves branch selection and task success over alternative baselines, including short-history and recurrent memory. Project page: https://jeong-zju.github.io/trace

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

FOSC-X: An Extended Framework for Optimal Local Cuts and Non-Horizontal Cluster Selection from Clustering Hierarchies

arXiv:2606.18972v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Extracting a flat clustering solution from a hierarchy is a common task in practical cluster analysis and can be formulated as an optimisation problem. Existing approaches focus on finding a single optimal solution. We introduce FOSC-X, a framework for extracting the top-M globally optimal flat clusterings from local, non-horizontal cuts of a hierarchical cluster tree, while optionally enforcing constraints on the number of clusters. This enables automatic identification of multiple high-quality alternative clusterings that capture different aspects of the hierarchical structure. Without constraints, the top-M problem can be solved in polynomial time using dynamic programming, exploiting the property that locally optimal partial candidates within subtrees can be combined to form globally optimal solutions while automatically determining the number of clusters. However, this can lead to solutions with numbers of clusters that are ultimately undesirable – e.g., too large to be meaningful or practically analysed within a particular application domain. Imposing cluster-count constraints breaks the optimality property underlying the unconstrained dynamic programming approach, since locally optimal partial candidates may no longer combine into feasible globally optimal solutions. FOSC-X addresses this challenge through a dynamic programming strategy that maintains compact sets of feasible candidates using lower and upper feasibility bounds while pruning infeasible or dominated combinations. The resulting method guarantees optimal rankings of the top-M solutions with linear-time complexity in the number of cluster nodes and dataset size, both with and without cluster-count constraints. Experiments show that FOSC-X efficiently reveals alternative clustering structures overlooked by single-solution extraction methods.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Reinforcement-aware Knowledge Distillation for LLM Reasoning

arXiv:2602.22495v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) post-training has recently driven major gains in long chain-of-thought reasoning large language models (LLMs), but the high inference cost of such models motivates distillation into smaller students. Most existing knowledge distillation (KD) methods are designed for supervised fine-tuning (SFT), relying on fixed teacher traces or teacher-student Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence-based regularization. When combined with RL, these approaches often suffer from distribution mismatch and objective interference: teacher supervision may not align with the student's evolving rollout distribution, and the KL regularizer can compete with reward maximization and require careful loss balancing. To address these issues, we propose RL-aware distillation (RLAD), which performs selective imitation during RL – guiding the student toward the teacher only when it improves the current policy update. Our core component, Trust Region Ratio Distillation (TRRD), replaces the teacher-student KL regularizer with a PPO/GRPO-style likelihood-ratio objective anchored to a teacher–old-policy mixture, yielding advantage-aware, trust-region-bounded distillation on student rollouts and naturally balancing exploration, exploitation, and imitation. Across diverse logic reasoning and math benchmarks, RLAD consistently outperforms offline distillation, standard GRPO, and KL-based on-policy teacher-student knowledge distillation.

24.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Unclonable Encryption in the Haar Random Oracle Model

arXiv:2603.11437v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We construct unclonable encryption (UE) in the Haar random oracle model, where all parties have query access to $U,U^\dagger,U^*,U^T$ for a Haar random unitary $U$. Our scheme satisfies the standard notion of unclonable indistinguishability security, supports reuse of the secret key, and can encrypt arbitrary-length messages. That is, we give the first evidence that (reusable) UE, which requires computational assumptions, exists in "microcrypt", a world where one-way functions may not exist. As one of our central technical contributions, we build on the recently introduced path recording framework to prove a natural ``unitary reprogramming lemma'', which may be of independent interest.

25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

HeteRo-Select: Informativeness as the Participation Driver in Heterogeneous Federated Learning

arXiv:2508.06692v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Federated learning systems typically allocate gradient compression by link speed. This is sensible when bandwidth and data informativeness align. However, under non-IID data, these signals often decorrelate or invert. A bandwidth-driven allocator then risks compressing the most informative gradients hardest. We propose HeteRo-Select, a framework that replaces bandwidth with a per-client informativeness score as the primary driver of compression. The score jointly governs three decisions per round: client selection, compression ratio, and server aggregation weight, with bandwidth retained only as a hard ceiling. Score-proportional selection provably reduces the effective heterogeneity of the chosen subset; score-proportional compression provably lowers aggregate top-$k$ error at fixed traffic. Under the exact FedCG simulation protocol, HeteRo-Select delivers a $1.78\times$ speedup and an $18.2\%$ reduction in traffic on CIFAR-10. The same configuration, unchanged, scales from a $7{,}850$-parameter logistic regression to an $11.27$M-parameter ResNet-18, hitting the accuracy target on three of four benchmarks. When bandwidth and informativeness are deliberately anti-correlated, the method still achieves the target accuracy with less traffic than the normal-bandwidth run.